military

Last week, the House Subcommittee on Military Personnel hosted a hearing on "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and its impact on military readiness.

In 1985, several years before President Bill Clinton's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" compromise attempted to allow gays in the military to serve unmolested, I was a young soldier building bridges and blowing things up with C4 at Ft. Leonard Wood, Missouri. That summer, my roommate was accused of having sex with another soldier in the barracks. The investigation, as I recall, was handled discreetly by our commanders: He was a well-liked Midwestern kid, and although no one could bring themselves to ask him about the inquiry, we all knew he was suffering.

I thought about my roommate during last week’s hearings on the impact of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" - an impact that has included drumming out military linguists with expertise in Arabic in the midst of a Middle Eastern war - and particularly during the testimony of Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, who spoke in defense of the ban on gay service members. Her comments are worth examining in detail.

A Nuclear Family Vacation is published by Bloomsbury.

The opening scene of the newest Indiana Jones film is set in Nevada in 1957, possibly during Operation Plumbbob, an actual nuclear-test series in which the U.S. measured the response of humans and physical structures to nuclear blasts. Satellite images give a hint of what's left: a pockmarked brown landscape of craters and broken buildings. There are smashed reinforced-concrete domes, shattered windows, as well as iron rails and bridges that the heat and explosion have twisted. It looks, I am told, like a place where Superman (or perhaps Uri Geller) had given himself over to a fit of rage.

More than three weeks after Cyclone Nargis, Burma's military junta has permitted a trickle of UN aid into the country -- but no relief supplies from the U.S., French, and U.K. warships that sit just off Burma's coast.

The warships in the Bay of Bengal have not been rendered useless. Their very presence has no doubt played a role in the junta's decision to let the UN operate in cyclone-ravaged areas to the degree that it has. From the junta's viewpoint, better a few UN helicopters and a modest number of international relief workers than a massive aid operation mounted by Western militaries, which would have embarrassed the junta and perhaps threatened its grip on power.

Congressional Democrats continue to hold up a free-trade deal with Colombia.

All the debate about Colombian free trade has obscured something important: Colombia is far safer now than it was five years ago. In fact, if Iraq were reclaiming terrorist-controlled areas as effectively as Colombia is, even the most die-hard opponents of the Iraq War would admit error. Colombia is, after Iraq and Afghanistan, our third-biggest nation-building project, and it is by far our most successful.

Gen. David Petraeus and Amb. Ryan Crocker returned to Congress for hearings on the state of Iraq.

Time was when members of Congress didn’t have to rely on just the media, fact-finding tours, or high-profile hearings to find out what was going on in a theater of war. Instead, our representatives could turn to trusted ex-comrades or relatives for an on-the-ground view. But that was in another, better United States. Fewer and fewer senators or representatives have any military experience and the connections that come with it. MORE

Charles Robert Jenkins, a U.S. Army deserter, has teamed with Jim Frederick to write a memoir of his forty years in North Korea.

Sgt. Jenkins's punishment is in his face -- a withered, jug-eared mug that looks about two decades older than its sixty-odd years. In January 1965, Jenkins deserted his unit in the Korean DMZ and slinked into North Korean territory, where he intended to turn himself in and go home after a prisoner-swap. The scheme failed badly. Instead of going home, he ended up confined with a handful of other American deserters, beaten bloody by one, malnourished from the start, and forced every day to do nothing but read and memorize the works of Kim Il Sung. It is a measure of the unpleasantness of the ensuing four decades that one low point was the ripping of a U.S. Army tattoo off his arm without anesthetic, and a high point was watching a bootleg video of Michael Jackson's (admittedly sublime) "Thriller," with the volume turned to nearly inaudible levels, lest someone hear it, turn him in, and possibly have him shot. MORE

Admiral William Fallon stepped down after a year at the head of U.S. Central Command.

The appointment of Fallon about a year ago set off alarms in many liberal minds. CENTCOM governs American military assets throughout the greater Middle East, including Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran, and has traditionally been led by an Army or Marine general. Bringing in a Navy man looked like an effort to remind Tehran that not all of America's military assets were tied down in Iraq. Now his unusual decision to announce an early retirement is setting off alarm bells among liberals who worry that Bush may be planning to, as John McCain would put it, "bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran." MORE

Japanese prosecutors have dropped charges against a U.S. Marine accused of rape in Okinawa.

John McCain and others often cite U.S. bases in Korea and Japan as a model for a long-term U.S. presence in Iraq. This rape case, which the Japanese authorities dropped because the family of the 14-year-old junior high student didn't want to pursue charges, is a reminder of one of the less savory dividends of U.S. bases in your backyard. U.S. military personnel have been raping Okinawans for the last 60-plus years. (For an early account, see this 1949 report by Time's Japan correspondent; Chalmers Johnson gives a detailed, and depressing, update in the Okinawa chapter of Blowback.) MORE

A B-2 bomber, at $1.2-billion apiece the most expensive bird in the US Air Force, crashed in Guam. The crew ejected safely.

Over a billion dollars, and all that's left is a pit of ashes.  Defense appropriations is tricky, and there are hidden costs to funding -- or not funding -- programs.  Will the B-2 prove indispensable in a war with Iran?  Is the US edge over its competitors in an air war too slim to permit slacking off in our quest for the most fearsome, and fearsomely expensive, plane the world has ever seen?

Here's a guess: the US would do just fine without the B-2.  Our air edge is massive, comparable to our sea edge, which is overwhelming enough that our navy is larger than those of all our major competitors and allies combined.  And the price of just one of these contraptions would go a long way in financing smaller-scale initiatives much more likely to improve our safety, like incentivizing defections, and placing bounties on the heads of our enemies.  A billion dollars buys a lot of heads.